Feature
Donta's Inferno
Student rapist Donta Graham-Preston is still walking the streets of Eugene, and the University is telling his victims this is justice.
BY MARK HEMINGWAY
I would be the one/ to hold you down/ kiss you so hard/ I'll take your breath away/ after I'd wash away the tears/ just close your eyes dear... --from "Possession" by Sarah MacLachlan
That was the song that was playing in the background when Katie* awoke to find him on top of her. They were friends, close friends--they had even engaged in what she would describe as foreplay on numerous occasions, but she thought that she had made it clear: no sex. She hadn't had sex in five years, and she wasn't about to start up again. Not with him, and not now. He had propositioned her in the past, and she had told him no. He respected her decision. She thought that this meant he could be trusted; that it was safe for her to spend the night at his house. But when she woke up with him on top of her, this time he wouldn't listen. She told him no repeatedly. He covered her mouth with his hands and he took off her clothes.
She told herself: "Leave this place. Please leave this place. This is going to hurt you. He's not taking you, he's taking a piece of meat. He's not taking you, this isn't you. Leave your body." He turned her over, maybe for the sake of pregnancy, to finish up. The next morning, as he lay with his back turned to her he said, "That will never happen again."
Kate got up the next morning, disoriented, and went to class. She was always a conscientious student. Over the course of the next term her grades slipped noticeably. Friends and co-workers commented on her change of attitude and withdrawn personality. She began dating another man, and four months after the rape she agreed to have consensual sex with him. They did, but the act caused Kate to have a vivid flashback of her rape. Her boyfriend woke up in the middle of the night to find her curled up on his dirty bathroom floor. He carried her back to bed and held her until she fell asleep. The next morning she told him everything about the rape, and with his encouragement she went to get help.
This is but one of the charges leveled against Donta (pronounced DON-TAY) Graham-Preston. If he told Kate that this would never happen again, then he was lying. Another University student alleged that three months after Kate's rape, Graham-Preston forcibly raped her, then pulled out and ejaculated on her chest. The two women came forward independently and their stories appear to be consistent. At least they are consistent enough for the University to believe them. While Graham-Preston himself has never been charged with a formal crime or found guilty in a real court of law, he was found guilty of violating the student conduct code four times (in the two women's hearings and subsequently in both appeals). In a world where a criminal trial is often referred to as "the second rape," this should be a victory on some level, particularly since the University of Oregon has gone through great pains to stop "the rape culture." Amid much debate, the U of O revised and broadened its criteria for sexual misconduct among students last year, and all year long ASUO Student Body President Bill Miner has had his staff working on a high-profile rape awareness program. Knowing that Graham-Preston has been convicted of violating the conduct code, it would appear that the efforts on behalf of the University community to address the problems surrounding sexual assault have been successful.
Or have they?
Donta Graham-Preston is still walking the streets. The University has no authority to enforce criminal sentences. If he had been found guilty in criminal proceedings, two counts of rape would have earned him a significant amount of time in the state penitentiary. The most severe punishment the University can hand down is expulsion, something that would seem warranted for a crime so serious. But if prevailing against Graham-Preston in the campus judicial system appeared to be a victory for his two alleged victims, it was a pyrrhic one. They knew at the start of the trial that the best they could hope for was expulsion. In the end, they didn't even get that. Graham-Preston can return to the University in two years after the victims are gone, re-enroll in the honors college and pick up right where he left off, and his record will be completely expunged. This is a frightening scenario. If Graham-Preston is found guilty of rape again when he returns to campus, the University will be responsible. This is a fact that weighs heavily on the minds of the alleged victims.
"It's bullshit," Kate said. "I don't think people realize that after hi being found guilty four times, he still can come back on campus and it's erased from his record. Once I leave this university he can come back on campus even with the other rape victims here and it will be almost as if nothing has happened. I feel like I was the troublemaker... They said 'She's right. We proved that her case is right. However, when she's gone no one will really notice. So why don't while she's here, because she'll make such a big fuss, we'll get him off campus. But when she's gone he can come right back on. We've already made her go through so much, she's not going to come back and fight it.' And they're right. I'm not going to come back and fight this."
She did everything the University told her to. She worked with Elaine Green and the Office of Student Life. She got her own attorney. She went through the taxing process of preparing for the hearing and then testified on the stand for over two-and-a-half hours. If Kate isn't happy with the outcome, and is unwilling to fight it anymore, then who will?
Security On Campus is the only non-profit organization in the country devoted to victim rights on college campuses. It was founded in 1987 by Howard and Connie Clery after their daughter Jeanne was brutally raped, beaten and murdered by a student whom she didn't know in her dormitory room at Lehigh University. Security On Campus has won numerous awards, been praised by President Bush and is responsible for several pieces of legislation including the 1990 Campus Security Act, which requires universities to disclose crime statistics. For over ten years, Security On Campus has specialized in providing legal assistance to rape victims on college campuses.
Security On Campus is adamantly against the idea of campus courts.
They are currently involved in two lawsuits against campus judicial systems, which they say are inherently biased. Eileen Wagner, a Security On Campus attorney currently representing a Georgia Tech student who claims she was gang-raped by members of the school's football team, said that this bias is a serious problem.
"Unelected and unsworn school employees, potentially biased by their own paychecks, substitute their ultimate judgement of guilt or innocence for alleged violent felonies handled by elected and sworn officials in every other arena. As if this were not enough affront to the Angol-American tradition of common law, the schools often decline to report the same serious crimes to appropriate police authorities, even for prevention purposes," Wagner said. As further evidence that universities use campus courts for their own ends rather than for any objective notion of justice, Wagner points to the lack of consistency in campus judicial systems.
"Many schools tout their proceedings as being something other than a 'court of law.' Whether modeled on a criminal trial, a civil action, an administrative hearing, an arbitration, or a mediation, the characterization expeditiously shifts fro one model to another as soon as the consistency of any formula meets an outside challenge," she said. The U of O is no exception to this, having recently revised its sexual conduct code. The jurisdiction of U of O's student conduct hearings are also being called into question by a lawsuit filed against the University by student Kevin Keeny, who was found guilty of sexual harassment in a student conduct hearing. That case is currently awaiting trial and if Keeny wins, the U of O's hearings process is likely to change radically--again. Even in Kate's trial, Graham-Preston's attorney, Ken Morrow, cited an Oregon Administrative Rule which says that the University can only regulate student conduct "on institutionally owned or controlled property." While Morrow agreed to proceed with University hearings, he presented this fact as a potential "out" for his client, knowing that University conduct hearings are only valid as long as they aren't subject to official legal scrutiny. So far, University hearings are largely untested, and those that have been haven't held up well.
Wagner also contends that the political climate on college campuses is detrimental to rape victims seeking justice. Students who are being encouraged to pursue charges of rape on campus are misled about the real nature of criminal trials. According to Wagner, "Collegiate critics ignore the fact that in the last 15 years, most states have radically modernized laws prohibiting sexual assault and have spent considerable money and effort in upgrading investigation, prosecution and victim assistance for sexual violence. Instead of discovering the true state of affairs and encouraging student-citizens to enforce their unalienable rights--as one might expect is the duty of an educational institution--these schools perpetuate outdated stereotypes of public servants including police officers, prosecutors and judges as being insensitive and sexist." And while many issues might still remain with regard to criminal sexual assault trials, she points out that judges, attorneys and juries are never going to be sensitized if women are constantly encouraged not to confront them with these problems. And what happens after University students graduate? They are ill-prepared by the University to seek justice in the real world.
No one told her about Security On Campus. Yet, Kate was aware of her options--other than pursuing justice through the campus judicial system. She could have filed criminal charges against him and he would have gone to jail if he had been found guilty. She could have filed a civil suit against him and possibly won compensatory damages for his crime. But, as little satisfaction as she feels with the outcome of the campus hearing, Kate still remains wary of the possibility of bringing the case into an actual court of law.
Civil cases are obviously about money, and she feels that taking Graham-Preston's money would be inappropriate and cause people to question her motivation for seeking justice. Criminal trials in sexual assault cases are notorious for being a traumatic experience for the victim. For any crime other than rape, questioning the victim's state of mind, history and judgement would quickly be deemed inappropriate; yet, this is standard operating procedure in a rape trial. And criminal cases require that the plaintiff prove their case "beyond a reasonable doubt." This is something that is often very difficult to do in rape trials, which often boil down to a matter of he said/she said. In this respect, campus proceedings have a large advantage over criminal or civil trials. The campus judicial system requires that the accuser be able to provide a "preponderance of evidence," something that provokes a lot of ire from hard-line constitutionalists. But whatever the controversy surrounding this different criteria, it makes campus courts seem a lot more inviting to alleged rape victims.
"When I first reported it," Kate said, "everyone was like 'do it through the University, it's going to be a lot nicer--it's not going to be criminal, it's only preponderance of evidence, it's not beyond a reasonable doubt.'" The way our laws are written it's virtually impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt unless she quickly goes to the hospital and goes through a series of tests that are not only painful emotionally, but also physically. Stuff like combing her pubic hair--"That is what persuaded me to go through the University. I thought that with a preponderance of evidence, the questions would not be as invasive."
While "preponderance of evidence" might have made it easier to convict Graham-Preston, there is little evidence to show that it made the hearings less invasive. According to the transcript of Kate's hearing, she spent over two-and-a-half hours on the stand answering questions about her sexual assault history, sexual proclivities and family problems. They even subpoenaed her current boyfriend to discuss their sex life. Graham-Preston spent twenty minutes on the stand and was not asked questions of a similar nature.
"I was really surprised when I got into the hearings room and I was given the questions that, supposedly, I wasn't supposed to be asked," Kate said.
Kate is still entitled to her reservations surrounding the real court system; that is her right. However, her experience begs the question: If the University judicial system is going to subject someone to further "victimization" by asking them questions about their father's employment status and oral sex habits, why not do so in a real court where there is at least a chance at an effective sentence for the alleged criminal? And similarly, what good does it do to make it easier to convict someone with "preponderance of evidence" (fairness issues aside) if the University is incapable of backing up that conviction with an appropriate punishment?
While those answers are still being decided by Graham-Preston's alleged victims, the University can rest comfortably knowing that it is in the clear. This system works well for the University. They can resolve serious issues while minimizing the amount of negative publicity, which might lower enrollment and hamper donations. In fact, sexual conduct codes were originally developed in the 1960's as a means of protecting star athletes.
This system can even be beneficial for many victims. Kate found a support system in Elaine Green and the Office of Student Life that she is very grateful for and that wouldn't have been there during a real-world court case. The University offers the victims a path of little resistance at a very difficult time in their lives.
But is it good for the University community as a whole? Wait two years and let your sisters and daughters come to this university, date Donta Graham-Preston and find out.
*The victim's real name was not used at her request.
Mark Hemingway, a senior majoring in Journalism, is Associate Editor for the Oregon Commentator